Lessons Learned

I've come to realize the importance of goals. To this point, "success" has meant making money. To a degree, I think that's still true. But it is somewhat like a professional sports team defining success as winning a championship. There is also truth in that, but there's more truth to the fact pro sports teams can succeed without a championship. Just ask the Toronto Maple Leafs.

So the difference is, I've begun to think in terms of goals, and what needs to happen in order to achieve those goals. Each goal will ultimately map to the "winning a championship" style goal. That goal would be to have SoarPort earn $100K per year. If SoarPort ever somehow did that, obviously it would be a tremendous success. Prior to that point, however, there are probably 100K goals to achieve. Therefore, the financial goal is pretty abstract at this point. Instead, more immediate goals need to be set and achieved.

SoarPort has been up for 1 calendar month. In that time 975 people have visited the site. By June 8, a goal for SoarPort is to have 1500 people visit the site. And so, to achieve that goal, we must test, test, test different strategies to get there. I love to look back at Archive.org. If you look at the first 3 months of YouTube's history, they radically revamped the front page of that site 3 times!! 3 major re-writes in 3 months...clearly YouTube followed the test,test,test strategy. And even in the early going, YouTube was one of those rare success stories. So if a site which is generating a lot of visits feels the need to test new entry pages, then the rest of us should as well.


Both 10GoldenRules and the article at http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof/ also talked about the importance of using resources such as Google Trends. In the case of 10GoldenRules, Google Trends is considered valuable because it can assist in keyword selection. In the article, Google Trends is not really a direct area of focus, but the idea here is you would follow the trends first, and then come up with an idea second: a professional responds to a market need. And this is a challenge for someone like me: just because you have the skill to do it, should you? That is a question I do not use to scrutinize my ideas (enough). Having said that, the can/should question also ties into testing: perhaps SoarPort falls more into the "can" category than the "should" category, but by testing SoarPort with some currently hot trends -such as Facebook, MySpace, and Google Gadgets, we can move more into the "should" category, while at the same time testing and driving toward a goal of increasing our audience. So, to achieve my goal of 1500 people in June, I will review current trends, and aim to align what SoarPort offers with what is in demand due to the trend.